Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London
November 9, 2024
It opens promisingly. The audience enters to be greeted by a grey, gloomy scene. To a gurgling, fuzzy soundscape by Alisdair Macindoe, eight dancers clad in costume designer Paula Levis’ slouchy black street pants and top slowly enter the space. They stretch, they sit around. They walk around. They pause, look. It’s moody, slightly ominous and there’s a distinct sense of waiting.
As it subsequently develops and those initial sounds give way to rhythmic buzzes and bleeps backed by percussive noise, 4/4, created by artistic director Antony Hamilton with the dancers, turns into a structurally dense and complex choreography.
Photo Gianna Rizzo
The eight dancers (four male, four female) are initially divided into two fours (two male, two female), each on or immediately around two low, wheeled staging decks, each around three metres long by one metre wide. They’re like rafts in the sea that is the stage, and, in a way, used as such.
Each foursome is then divided again by gender, the pairs dancing largely unison. The arm-gesture laden movement is not quite robotic but certainly machine like. Macindoe’s sound design sparks actions. Arms weave through the air, torsos twisting and bending in response. The couples were never anything less that absolutely precise and perfectly in sync. It was quite mesmerising. For a while.
As the work picks up, the platforms move along carefully constructed pathways. Later, more platforms are introduced with even the speakers acting as plinths, and the dancer configurations change. Suggesting that those set elements are additional dancers, as a programme found online does (though oddly not made available to the London audience), is stretching things rather.
The dancers themselves become increasingly fluid. It’s not as mesmerising as the opening, but captivating nonetheless.
For all the excellence of the performers, about halfway through, 4/4 starts to lose its pull, however. As mathematically precise as it is (think Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker), the choreography starts to feel like an exercise in how many ways can we move a platform in particular. That the initial foreboding atmosphere has by now dissipated doesn’t help.
There seemed to be little intent behind the movement either. Feeling and meaning were notable by their absence. While there’s nothing wrong with movement for movement’s sake per se, dance does need to reach out and connect. But 4/4 felt very aloof, not quite as grey as the colour palette by increasingly heading that way.
For all that 4/4 is very much an ensemble work, the highlight of the hour-long work comes with one of the very few occasions the stage is left to a couple of dancers. David Prakash and (I think) Aimee Schollum were terrific in a duet that truly brought their hip-hop skills to the fore.
While each section of 4/4 builds on what went before, it never really takes off. While interesting, it’s hardly the ground-breaking creation claimed. In a way it’s quite meditative. And although a golden sun peaks through the grey lighting at the end, there’s no real conclusion.